On the trail of great bread!

April 2014 Wet Dough Experiment with Whole Wheat Flour and Yeast

After my previous attempts using recipes I found in “The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day”, I decided to modify the recipes to be more in line with the amount of dough I usually make and also I wanted a larger whole wheat percentage in the loaf. I increased the flour amount to 1000g, and then checked the amount of water required. That turned out to be in line with my expectations (750ml), but since I wanted to make a more whole wheat version, I decided to use the following amounts:

800ml water

350g whole wheat flour

650g white bread flour

11g yeast

19g salt

This ended up producing a slightly too wet dough, as it turned out. I had forgotten that I wasn’t using 100% whole wheat or rye and that even in my normal sourdough recipes I only use 750ml of water. As a result the first loaf ended up being a bit too flat and did not rise enough in the oven. To deal with that I ended up working the dough a bit and that helped to improve the oven spring. The taste was still great, but the format was not what I had wanted. See the result here:

35% whole-wheat 800ml water loaf

As you can see from this image and the image below:

35% whole-wheat 800ml water loaf sliced

The internal structure as a result of spending several days in the refrigerator was pretty good, but the loaf didn’t rise enough. Another experiment is coming though :).